...And Never Let HerGo

for my family. I am dealing with it with God’s help as well as I can. My family is dealing with it. They have been devastated by it, obviously. I am extremely remorseful for the anguish I have caused my wife and my children and my parents.”
    T OM barely glanced at the man he had once considered a good friend. Brady was leaving the courtroom—but Tom knew who was going to take the witness stand next. Debby. Not long ago he had told Debby what an asset she would be in a trial and how well she would reflect on the side she supported. But now she wouldn’t betestifying for him. She was going to be on the side of “the Nazi” and “the hangman.”
    Aware that she no longer even read his letters, Tom had tried a more subtle tack to bring Debby back to his side. He had arranged to have books sent to her. “One was called
Marguerite,”
Debby would later recall, “some kind of romance and not the sort of book I ever read. The other was about Canadian provincial history. I knew what he was trying to convey. He was saying, ‘Think of my mother—and remember the wonderful time we had in Montreal.’ But it was too late for that.”

Chapter Forty
    I T WAS SHORTLY AFTER ELEVEN on the morning of November 18 when Debby MacIntyre entered the side door of the courtroom, took the witness stand, and raised her hand to be sworn. She was familiar to many Wilmingtonians, but those in the gallery who didn’t know her were surprised to see that she looked nothing like a sultry femme fatale. She was petite, her face was clean of makeup as always, and she didn’t look anywhere near her age, which was forty-eight. She wore a powder blue skirt and vest, a tailored white blouse.
    Inside, Debby was frightened, and yet there was relief in finally being able to tell her whole story. Even though she had friends who had supported her in the year since Tom’s arrest, there had been so many things she wasn’t allowed to talk about. “There were legalities,” she said, “that I had to keep secret until the trial.”
    She looked down now on Wharton, Connolly, Alpert, and Donovan—the men who had once annoyed her and whom she now trusted completely. And she looked Tom in the eye. He was scowling at her, and yet his displeasure no longer had any effect on her. He no longer had any power over her.
He was just a man.
    Ferris Wharton would conduct Debby’s direct examination. He had warned her she might be on the stand all day—and quite possibly for several days. She had to be prepared to bare her personal life for all the world to see and to have Tom’s attorneys ask impertinent and insulting questions. They would have to—Debby was probably the prosecution witness most dangerous for Tom.
    For the first hour of her testimony, Wharton led her through her own life. It was odd; after almost two decades of hiding her affairwith Tom, she now told the jurors and the gallery all of the details of their relationship. Asked about buying a gun for Tom, Debby related that he had asked her several times to do him that favor. And finally, when he again asked her on Mother’s Day—May 12, 1996—after they had returned from a romantic trip to Washington, D.C., she told him she would do it. Tom had made it easy by picking her up at Tatnall and driving her to Miller’s gun shop.
    “Do you recognize what that is?” Wharton asked her, holding up a form.
    “It’s a receipt for the gun and the bullets that I purchased.”
    He held up another form. “That is the form,” Debby said, “that I filled out that said it was against the law to transfer firearms.”
    “It bears your signature?”
    “Yes.”
    Debby identified a whole series of forms that she had signed and then immediately violated by turning the little Beretta over to Tom. It had cost her “around $180.”
    “Did he ever pay you back for the gun?”
    “No.”
    For most of the evening and early morning hours of June 27–28, 1996, only Debby and Anne Marie had been in touch with Tom. Now Wharton asked Debby to reconstruct her activities during that vital time period and, in doing so, place Tom in certain locations.
    “Let me ask you about the date, June twenty-seventh of 1996,” Wharton said. “Do you recall speaking to the defendant that day?”
    “The first time [was] in the morning, about nine-thirty to ten-thirty . . . I was at work.”
    “When was the second time?”
    “About five . . . He told me he had to go to Philadelphia for a meeting and wouldn’t be too late